Why forcing teens to shut down the internet doesn't work

A new study criticizes South Korea's infamous "shutdown law"

Chris Ferguson, for the Houston Chronicle

October 10, 2017

Photo: Lianne Williams / EyeEm / Getty Images

A new study found that South Korea's "shutdown law" banning the internet between midnight and 6 a.m. improved children's sleep by only 1.5
minutes and had negligible impact on problems with regulating its use.

A new study found that South Korea's "shutdown law" banning the...

One of the most famous, or infamous, efforts to protect young people from the possibility of internet or video game addiction is South Korea's "shutdown law," which was implemented in 2011. The shutdown law was designed to block access to the internet between midnight and 6 a.m., so that those young people, the thinking went, would sleep instead of gaming their way into senselessness.

A 2017 study by Korean scholars Changjun Lee, Hongbum Kim and Ahreum Hong analyzed the impact of the "shutdown law" for young people in Korea. They found that the law improved children's sleep by a whopping 1.5 minutes and had negligible impact on problems with regulating internet use.

The authors conclude that the law's negative impact on human rights and free speech far outweigh its insignificant benefits.

So, tempting as it might sound to some parents to yank all the kids off the internet at night, this doesn't seem to do them any actual good.

Why not?

One reason might be that concepts of internet and video game addiction remain mired in controversy. As a scholar who studies these concepts, I'm concerned they remain ill-defined. Certainly, some individuals game or use the internet too much, but some evidence suggest that these behaviors are symptoms of underlying mental health issues, not entirely new diagnoses in and of themselves.

One recent study from Oxford University found that individuals rated high in symptoms of "game addiction" weren't actually worse off than others, either in terms of psychological or physical health. So, as much as we talk about things like game addiction, it's not clear that this issue predicts a person's wellbeing.

That hasn't stopped groups like the American Psychiatric Association and World Health Organization from considering differing gaming addiction diagnoses. But even these organizations can't agree with each other what such a diagnosis would look like.

So, it's not clear what problem policies like South Korea's "shutdown law" are meant to fix. It's also not clear that something like a shutdown is the best solution even if a problem does exist. Of course, something like South Korea's shutdown law would be blatantly unconstitutional in the United States. But what should parents who are concerned with excessive gaming or internet use do?

Naturally, no one would advocate for the idea that parents should have no limits on kids' screen time. Though it's hard to say how many hours of screens are too many (even the American Academy of Pediatrics backed down from making any recommendations on this score), media use must be balanced with the demands of work and school, family, exercise and adequate sleep.

But a draconian shutdown doesn't seem to be the solution. Taking away all the screens and locking them in a cabinet at night only communicates distrust and likely creates a "forbidden fruit" effect that could challenge young people to overcome those obstacles. Talking with kids about reasonable guidelines and adjusting them according to school or weekends and holiday schedules might work better.

Besides, evidence suggests that teens' poor sleep schedules could have more to do with our foolish insistence to start high school early in the morning. Young people's natural sleep schedules seem to involve late nights and late mornings. Their inability to achieve the opposite might be due more to badly thought-out school schedules than screens.

Nightly screen use is something worth negotiating between parents and young people. It's not unreasonable to suggest that kids get to sleep earlier on school nights, but relaxing those rules on weekends or holidays probably just lets kids make good use of their natural sleep/wake cycles. And forcing kids to go to sleep at midnight is no guarantee they'll sleep well. Maybe, if we're serious about making sure kids get adequate sleep, we need to reexamine school schedules rather than screen use.